This is ridiculous.

DaCrum, I can't take you seriously at all here. Half the things you, BR, and Sentios provide are strawman arguments. When I say "Communism fails because yadda yadda yadda" and BR says "You're wrong because you are not speaking philosophically," that's a strawman argument (because it doesn't answer the "yadda yadda yadda" part). When I suggest that there are minimal rewards for someone who shovels shit in a Communist system except maybe a pat on the back, a medical checkup and a bar of soap, and Sentios says "A medical checkup would be a good reward because some people in America can't afford it," that's a strawman argument (because in a Communist society it'd be free anyway so what makes it a reward?). In an earlier thread, when I disproved your claim that Beck called Obama a Muslim, you returned with the most embarrassing strawman argument ever, "Oh, he's not a Muslim, but he's a bad Christian?" I don't think you even realize how bad that is.

And about cynicism, isn't that what you do half the time when you talk about any Conservative? Does that render any point you have invalid? Or does cynicism only apply to other people?

And is there something wrong with posting articles? Don't you use articles to expand your point? Are you saying it's bad to use evidence to support your claim?


I love how you can't see that that's what you and others are doing. You're so focussed on being right that you can't see where you're wrong.

I can't see video on my ship, so I can't watch it. I was talking about how the system makes several assumptions about people that are not based on facts of any kind, but oh well.

Now if you freaks of nature will stop endlessly arguing over a system that has consistently failed every time it was tried, we can get back to George Soros.

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Then by all means live in your delusion.

If we are Ruff, and I know you are, then clearly this argument is a straw house, and neither group wants to talk on the other's level.

Which is fairly common, and also why these discussions never go anywhere.


So hey Val, anything good for a topic this week?

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RuffDraft: I have personal vendettas against articles. Fuck the, a, an, and all those stupid mother fuckers.

Also, we're not providing strawmen, we're bringing it logically. What you're doing is a fallacy called appeal to history, which is barely a fallacy in real world politics, but a fallacy nonetheless. We're saying "Don't attack Stalinism(strawman!), attack Communism." which we've never seen. And my point with attacking Beck is the fact that he really didn't take back what he said, he just tried to reword it to sound nicer.

And George Soros is still pointless. Useless. Harmless. Smelly. Going to die in the next decade. Then who will Beck attack?

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Escape will make me God.

Wait, when was I cynical about conservatives?
I just called them assholes.

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There's conservatives I like. They're level headed and smart. They've shown this to me. One of my favorite job references is a heavy conservative, and a locally powerful man, the mirror to my dad as the local liberal smarthead.

I. Don't. Like. Beck.

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Escape will make me God.

DaCrum:

1) Why should Beck take back what he said about Obama being a bad Christian? That's his opinion based off his belief. He's entitled to it and had done nothing wrong in saying it.

2) Name a single person who has ever followed and abided by the Communist Manifesto to the letter and we'll go from there.

3) You might be saying things that make sense, but they are strawman arguments. If (just as an example) you said "Capitalism is bad because of the rich people who try to take advantage of the system," and I replied with "But they're not being true to the philosophy of Capitalism," how is that not a strawman argument? If you said "President Obama came out in support of a handgun ban in DC," and I said "Oh, he's against handguns but not assault rifles?" how is that not a strawman argument? Argue it as you will, what you made was a strawman argument, plain and simple.

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I'll have one up later today. Until then, consider the ongoing discussion still open, but under encouragement to move to the new thread.

DaCrum is more right than you are, RD, with regards to the argument techniques that are attempting to be employed here. we're not making arguments in response to your statement directly, and we're not using it as evidence that you are wrong on your cases, we're simply approaching your definitions before we come to those points of discussion.

that's not a strawman argument, that's not even an argument. It's a framing technique to better understand terms. even if you directly quote some phraseology that would suggest strawman argument, we're simply going to turn the discussion away again, because we're trying to understand terms before we understand evidence.

you keep trying to press the argument under certain definitions, and we just don't agree. either conform to our standard of definition or try to supercede it with better definitions, don't keep pushing one argument forward with the hopes that "we'll get it and stop being bad at argument" because that's not the case. Yeesh, man. Even if you point out specific words to support your 'strawman' stint, you're not going to be solving anything, you're just going to allow yourself to be diverted further.

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Bleedcomics Staff Writer/Editor, , and Keeper of the Jar Brain of Secret President. RIP Ku Ku Ku \(-^.^-)/ U Wuz A REAL N***A!!!!!!!
"We're quite aware of this. BR is no happy rainbow face man. He is simply our neighborhood best fucking poster." ~ Warbear
Puff Most Epic.

Adam Smith himself said capitalism relies on "selfish profit-seeking". What he was against was "economic tourniquets", either caused by government or business. So that's not a strawman, that's attacking that particular system.


How is that a strawman? Well, assault rifles at first are easier to attack than handguns until you consider that most gun crimes are committed with hand guns. Either way, people are more likely to support an assault rifle ban than a handgun ban because people don't know guns. So... STRAWMAN.

So. STRAWMAN.

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Escape will make me God.

Weekly discussion 14 (2/7-2/14): Scale in video games

I came across this image, and it got me thinking about the scale of video game worlds. For background there, Azeroth is the world of the Warcraft games, and the scale given there is based on measurements taken in World of Warcraft. The Raven is a kind of battleship in Eve Online, and a smartbomb is an area-effect weapon that damages everything within a certain radius of the ship. They're about the shortest-ranged weapons - the typical short/long range weapons of a Raven can hit to about 30 and 250km respectively. Despite the massively larger scale of the Eve world, the much larger scale of activity means that there's not so much of a difference in experience.

So considering both the "objective" size of a video game world and what goes on in it, how does the scale of a video game world matter to you? Does Stormwind feel bigger than Jita? Does that matter for what you do there? Or what about Mario Kart vs. F-Zero, or Pikmin vs. Super Mario?

the human ability to scale things is an amazing tool in itself, so the fact that it is stretched and played with in games is awesome to me.

the relationship is tenuous but the patterns do exist: in first person shooters, it is much easier to place importance on scale and personal affectation because the scale retains much of the typical perspective of a person. Third person games usually are less impressive with scale because you've already had to adjust to see your character, so other scale changes aren't that cool. A notable exception is Katamari Damacy, which makes you hyper aware of your sense of scale. :o

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Bleedcomics Staff Writer/Editor, , and Keeper of the Jar Brain of Secret President. RIP Ku Ku Ku \(-^.^-)/ U Wuz A REAL N***A!!!!!!!
"We're quite aware of this. BR is no happy rainbow face man. He is simply our neighborhood best fucking poster." ~ Warbear
Puff Most Epic.

Why the hell is Azeroth so damned small?

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Escape will make me God.

How do you find it small?

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Tuor: Stuff is our resident, hot mess, alcoholic.
Senel: Stuff is the patron saint of getting shitfaced. You replaced your organs with an engine that runs solely on alcohol.
RIP Lucky. I love you so much.

Their sea is less than 10km wide. That's tiny.

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Escape will make me God.

I only care about the scale in its execution, and if you lack the resources a smaller sense of scale but done well is better than miles of things that are a bit forgettable.

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One time when I was high, I thought I was in an ambulance dying. Turns out I was just eating sherbert.
-stufflikehearts-

Well... I feel very out of place here... But Minecraft randomly generates a world 4x the size of earth, or so I've heard.

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I think that this affects Eve Online particularly. It has thousands of solar systems rendered at full scale, which makes it by far the largest game I know of, even compared to the size of the avatars. Like a real solar system though, the overwhelming majority of each is empty space, and most things take place near discrete spots of interest. You can travel between those spots at sublight speeds, but for practical purposes a solar system is a bunch of discrete spots people warp between. And you have to deliberately try in order to get a sense of what scale things are supposed to be. I think that sprawling games where you can wander around seamlessly have a larger feel to them.

I'd guess a compromise between factors including the space demands of the game, design costs, and hardware capacity when it was made. There seems to be a trend in making larger game worlds as a selling point, though nothing I know of approaches playable full scale modeling of a planet's surface. Minecraft possibly notwithstanding.

Weekly discussion 15 (2/15-2/22): Moore's Law and its implications for society

Moore's Law is an important part of information technology development, and the state as of a few years ago is described here. Long-term growth in world processing power is about 58% per year. Hard drive, flash memory, and network capacities are growing even faster. Currently, the Internet is subsuming other media. What happens over another twenty years as the underlying technology becomes tens or hundreds of thousands of times more powerful? The top supercomputers are reaching estimates of the processing power of the human brain, though no one knows how to program a mind. What happens when that knowledge is available and Moore's Law keeps chugging along? This is an increasingly mainstream consideration (Time ran an article on it recently), and it looks like it will be a major influence on society over the next few decades. Past then, predictions tend to break down due to things getting pretty wild.

So, what do you think is going to happen as the power of information technology keeps doubling every year or so?

less and less reasons to justify bad things needing to exist in the world, for one thing. i don't even mean this as a short-term thing, either.

however, i believe i linked information to a webcomic that summarizes my opinion of the technological singularity: even if that technology is available, it will still be a divided dream from a majority of humanity, and thus simply something else to divide people into specific groups that do more harm than good.

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Bleedcomics Staff Writer/Editor, , and Keeper of the Jar Brain of Secret President. RIP Ku Ku Ku \(-^.^-)/ U Wuz A REAL N***A!!!!!!!
"We're quite aware of this. BR is no happy rainbow face man. He is simply our neighborhood best fucking poster." ~ Warbear
Puff Most Epic.

Oh, I'm sure they'll break Moore's law eventually. I say the power of immersion between what is real and what is not will change up, and no matter how far you advance in technology, humanity lags behind. How well we cope with what's to come is anyone's guess.

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One time when I was high, I thought I was in an ambulance dying. Turns out I was just eating sherbert.
-stufflikehearts-

Since Ray Kurzweil's already been mentioned... (I don't know why he tries to predict exact years into the future, it's not extremely important) http://www.ted.com/talks/ray_kurzweil_a ... rsity.html

http://www.ted.com/talks/ray_kurzweil_o ... rm_us.html

Weekly discussion 16 (4/28-5/5): Birtherism and politics

Obama recently released his "long form" birth certificate. End of the birther movement? Apparently not. So, what does Spam think?

1) 1/4 of Americans are retarded.
2) Retarded Americans are immune to facts.
3) President is too black for people to accept it.

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This post is intended for information only. Please do not reply to this message as responses cannot be read or acknowledged due to the stupidity of the user.

race will be an issue for as long as it takes for "reverse racism" to be discredited as an idea, which will only happen once people accept the historical precedent of SPECIFICALLY GIVING A BENEFIT TO A GROUP OF PEOPLE HISTORICALLY LACKING THAT BENEFIT in order to correct that particular social problem of inequity.

See: the denial of white privilege, the outcry against affirmative action, and really any time white americans get upset that because they personally haven't seen themselves having benefited from white privilege then the whole thing clearly never existed at all.

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Bleedcomics Staff Writer/Editor, , and Keeper of the Jar Brain of Secret President. RIP Ku Ku Ku \(-^.^-)/ U Wuz A REAL N***A!!!!!!!
"We're quite aware of this. BR is no happy rainbow face man. He is simply our neighborhood best fucking poster." ~ Warbear
Puff Most Epic.